Tag Archives: 5000 metres

I found a few great training spreadsheets over the years and some are linked to on this site. One is The5kRunner and DanielsTables v3 tools. It’s complicated but interesting if you have 15 minutes to kill (which will turn into an hour!) Another is this spreadsheet Calculator. Like many of you I often train by Heart…

I found a few great training spreadsheets over the years and some are linked to on this site. One is The5kRunner and DanielsTables v3 tools. It’s complicated but interesting if you have 15 minutes to kill (which will turn into an hour!) Another is this spreadsheet Calculator. Like many of you I often train by Heart…

I saw the 5k wheelchair race last night on Channel 4. Amazingly interesting race and actually quite exciting. A strange combination between the drafting of cycling and tactics of running. Of course the British guy won! Job well done. It’s a 5k race so I look forward to seeing him and Mo Farah race it…

I got a SB today for one of my localish parkrun courses Season’s Best! Haven’t had a PB for a long time so anything counts. If they are good enough to report on the BBC for the Helsinki Euro Champs then they are good enough for me! I was 30 seconds off which sounds a…

After having moaned a bit on this blog last year about the London Duathlon I feel obliged to give them a bit of free PR this year. I bemoaned the fact that their distances are ‘wrong’. Wrong in the sense of non-standard rather than incorrectly measured. Apparently the new organisers did change the transition and…

I’d generally politely suggest the abstinence taper for most of us most of the time. IE do nothing for 2-3 days before the race. 2 days for the youngsters and 3 if you are less inclined to recover more quickly. I’d say that this would be a parkrun-friendly taper. For the week or so before…

You’ve probably been trawling the net or this site for 5k plans. There’s quite a few on this site; some good, some less so. Probably any plan and a certain amount of hard work will get you below 20 minutes but some will do it faster than others because they are better… The best plan…

I needed a feel-good session today and for some bizarre reason my plan has 1 minute intervals with 2 min recovery. That’s a lot of speed and a lot of recovery, perhaps too much. Anyway I went faster than ever sneaking in quite a few minutes at 3 min/km pace… awesome. I just have to…

You’ve probably been looking for a 5k training plan. There’s lots out there and a few on this site. You’re not an elite runner by a long chalk but you’d like to improve your 5k times at your local parkrun. Thing is, all those plans take up so much time and have you running many…

Wow! 4th Feb 2012 will have Mark Spitz and Ed Moses running the Bushy Park parkrun 5k ‘race’ – that is if they bring their trainers. They are both about 60ish now and so if you come along to the Bushy Park parkrun you might finally have a chance of beating them! Well I’m sure…

Wow! 4th Feb 2012 will have Mark Spitz and Ed Moses running the Bushy Park parkrun 5k ‘race’ – that is if they bring their trainers. They are both about 60ish now and so if you come along to the Bushy Park parkrun you might finally have a chance of beating them! Well I’m sure…

Today wasn’t one of my most glorious performances. I managed a sneaky PB in around October last year. I’ve been training reasonably well since then. Certainly enough to have improved. Yet today I knew that I had only managed a long run 6 days previously. And before that I’d been focusing on building up my…

You’ve run a parkrun and your legs hurt. Naturally you want sympathy. But the response you will get will range from “Didums” to “Oh my gosh are you OK? Shin splints can be really serious, you should stop running for a while and go and see the doctor.” I don’t want to trivialise a bit…

With 5k running (and especially at parkruns with a wide variation in ability) people seem to think they are either brilliant, rubbish or improving. Well the one thing for sure is that you are ALL better than those sitting at home watching Saturday morning TV. But for those that think they are brilliant and those…

I hit my LTHR (Lactate Threshold Heart Rate) during a 5k PB at around the 1.5k mark. So what? You rightly ask. Well the LTHR is a point that when you perform above that point your body starts to accumulate too much lactic acid/lactate/H+ ions which, at SOME POINT, will cause you to stop. But…

We all want to get that PB down as low as we can. I guess there comes a point though where nature takes over and that PB will never be possible. But then you can just look at your age graded score instead! So there’s always room for improvement by some means. Even some 60…

How long will it take me to do 5k in less than 20 minutes? 5k runners often have unrealistic expectations about how quickly they can improve. When you start out the improvement is dramatic. But the improvement slows quickly and the training effort required to improve increases. It’s really a statement of the fairly obvious…

Yes. I would definately enter I represented GB in Age Group Duathlon and genuinely was worried that I may well have come last. As it turned out I wasn’t. There’s always someone somewhere that will be slower than you. You just have to hope they are in the same race!! But really who cares? Think…

This post is for 5k runners who are relative beginners and can run 5k in less than 35-40 minutes and who can run for 60 continuous minutes if they wanted to. Typically you may have previously been focusing on getting miles under your belt but have not found that you are getting faster 5k times…